SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

Some workflows require that one or more branches of development on one
machine be replicated on another machine, but the two machines cannot
be directly connected so the interactive git protocols (git, ssh,
rsync, http) cannot be used. This command provides support for
git-fetch and git-pull to operate by packaging objects and references
in an archive at the originating machine, then importing those into
another repository using git-fetch and git-pull
after moving the archive by some means (i.e., by sneakernet). As no
direct connection between repositories exists, the user must specify a
basis for the bundle that is held by the destination repository: the
bundle assumes that all objects in the basis are already in the
destination repository.

OPTIONS

create <file>

Used to create a bundle named file. This requires the
git-rev-list arguments to define the bundle contents.

verify <file>

Used to check that a bundle file is valid and will apply
cleanly to the current repository. This includes checks on the
bundle format itself as well as checking that the prerequisite
commits exist and are fully linked in the current repository.
git-bundle prints a list of missing commits, if any, and exits
with non-zero status.

list-heads <file>

Lists the references defined in the bundle. If followed by a
list of references, only references matching those given are
printed out.

unbundle <file>

Passes the objects in the bundle to git-index-pack
for storage in the repository, then prints the names of all
defined references. If a reflist is given, only references
matching those in the given list are printed. This command is
really plumbing, intended to be called only by git-fetch.

[git-rev-list-args...]

A list of arguments, acceptable to git-rev-parse and
git-rev-list, that specify the specific objects and references
to transport. For example, "master~10..master" causes the
current master reference to be packaged along with all objects
added since its 10th ancestor commit. There is no explicit
limit to the number of references and objects that may be
packaged.

[refname...]

A list of references used to limit the references reported as
available. This is principally of use to git-fetch, which
expects to receive only those references asked for and not
necessarily everything in the pack (in this case, git-bundle is
acting like git-fetch-pack).

SPECIFYING REFERENCES

git-bundle will only package references that are shown by
git-show-ref: this includes heads, tags, and remote heads. References
such as master~1 cannot be packaged, but are perfectly suitable for
defining the basis. More than one reference may be packaged, and more
than one basis can be specified. The objects packaged are those not
contained in the union of the given bases. Each basis can be
specified explicitly (e.g., ^master~10), or implicitly (e.g.,
master~10..master, --since=10.days.ago master).

It is very important that the basis used be held by the destination.
It is okay to err on the side of conservatism, causing the bundle file
to contain objects already in the destination as these are ignored
when unpacking at the destination.

EXAMPLE

Assume you want to transfer the history from a repository R1 on machine A
to another repository R2 on machine B.
For whatever reason, direct connection between A and B is not allowed,
but we can move data from A to B via some mechanism (CD, email, etc).
We want to update R2 with developments made on branch master in R1.

To bootstrap the process, you can first create a bundle that doesn't have
any basis. You can use a tag to remember up to what commit you sent out
in order to make it easy to later update the other repository with
incremental bundle,

Then you sneakernet file.bundle to the target machine B. Because you don't
have to have any object to extract objects from such a bundle, not only
you can fetch/pull from a bundle, you can clone from it as if it was a
remote repository.

machineB$ git clone /home/me/tmp/file.bundle R2

This will define a remote called "origin" in the resulting repository that
lets you fetch and pull from the bundle. $GIT_DIR/config file in R2 may
have an entry like this:

and sneakernet it to the other machine to replace /home/me/tmp/file.bundle,
and pull from it.

machineB$ cd R2
machineB$ git pull

If you know up to what commit the intended recipient repository should
have the necessary objects for, you can use that knowledge to specify the
basis, giving a cut-off point to limit the revisions and objects that go
in the resulting bundle. The previous example used lastR2bundle tag
for this purpose, but you can use other options you would give to
the git-log(1) command. Here are more examples:

You can use a tag that is present in both.

$ git bundle create mybundle v1.0.0..master

You can use a basis based on time.

$ git bundle create mybundle --since=10.days master

Or you can use the number of commits.

$ git bundle create mybundle -10 master

You can run git-bundle verify to see if you can extract from a bundle
that was created with a basis.

$ git bundle verify mybundle

This will list what commits you must have in order to extract from the
bundle and will error out if you don't have them.

A bundle from a recipient repository's point of view is just like a
regular repository it fetches/pulls from. You can for example map
refs, like this example, when fetching: